Category Archives: books

Although I heard rumors that Richard Dawkins was publishing a new book, I wasn’t aware that it was already finished and scheduled for publication. But Outgrowing God: A Beginner’s Guide is will be out October 8. I haven’t seen it, but it’s apparently intended for young people. And I’ve put below a 45-minute video interview […]

Five Books is generally a good site, and I’ve done at least two interviews with them. The site’s object is a good one: to get an expert in some field to recommend five books in their area of expertise, books from which the general public could profit. I did interviews about evolution and the incompatibility […]

If you look on Amazon, you’ll find that New York Times columnist Bari Weiss has a new book, How to Fight Anti-Semitism, which will be out September 10 ($14.02 in hardback, $9.99 on Kindle). I haven’t seen it yet, but apparently Weiss feels that anti-Semitism in America is on the rise, at least judging by the […]

The Times Literary Supplement, which I used to write for, doesn’t often make its articles free online, but this one was (click on screenshot below to see it). And it’s about free will: a review of three books on the topic (The Limits of Free Will: Selected essays by Paul Russell, Aspects of Agency: Decisions, […]

Most of us have enjoyed the spoofs of “woke” culture by Titania McGrath, who has not only 289,000 followers on Twitter, but a book, Woke: A Guide to Social Justice. Here Peter Whittle interviews the person who created and is channeled through Titania, comedian Andrew Doyle, who writes for Spiked and previously wrote for “Jonathan […]

If you’re in Chicago on Tuesday, remember that I will be having a discussion at the University of Illinois at Chicago with Andrew Seidel, a constitutional attorney for the Freedom from Religion Foundation, and author of the new book below on the secular origins of America. The time and place are in the announcement, it’s […]

Here’s some interesting material on the history of evolutionary biology, posted with permission of Dr. Browne. Last night I had dinner with several people associated with Harvard, among them Janet Browne, a renowed historian of science and a professor at the University. Janet is the author, among other things, of the definitive biography of Charles […]

UPDATE: James Wood has responded politely to this piece in a comment below, which you can find here. ************* The article below (click on screenshot), by New Yorker literary critic and Harvard English professor James Wood, is a review of Martin Hägglund’s new book, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom, but also a paean […]

This article from the Guardian (click on screenshot) reports that the Tàber public school in Barcelona is removing around 200 children’s books from its library because they have “hidden sexist content”: It may be hidden, but of course the censors consider it insidious: Several schools across Barcelona are considering purging their libraries of stereotypical and sexist children’s […]

I’ve just finished Nadine Strossen‘s 2018 book, HATE: Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship, one of 16 volumes in the series “Inalienable Rights,” edited by University of Chicago constitutional law professor Geoffrey Stone. Click on the screenshot to go to the book’s Amazon site: Strossen was president of the American Civil […]